This is why what we as software developers would describe as quality or reliability improvements are so difficult to sell to people making the decisions about what to spend our time with.

And worse, they're right - developing a feature can increase baseline profits more and faster than rewriting some old code can. The effects of software quality and the like are long-term.

But I can almost guarantee that all the unicorn companies we've seen in the past decades, the now trillion dollar companies, didn't become that because of code quality or diligence.